Gay rights activists have given mixed reviews to President Obama's "big gay speech" the other night, with many, including radio host Michelangelo Signorili, saying they're tired of words. They want action from this president -- and they want it NOW -- on repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell," on killing off the Defense of Marriage Act (good luck getting that through this Senate...) and on an Employment Non Discrimination Act (much more likely to get done in my opinion...)

Much of the heat on Obama is centered on the military policy, which many activists claim he can abolish (or at least arrest) with the "stroke of a pen," either by issuing a giant stop-loss order (which would have the unpleasant effect of preventing ALL troops from returning home to their families...) or by issuing an executive order demanding the military stop enforcing the law requiring the separation of gay and lesbian soldiers who admit as much, from service. It all sounds very simple, and activists claim that if Harry Truman could desegregate the military during the far more racist climate of the 1940s, Obama can do it now, since polls show a majority of Americans, both outside the military and inside, approve of open service. Plus, the Europeans are already doing it (the weakest argument of all, since Europeans also don't commit their troops to tough combat by and large, with the exception of the Brits, and never in the numbers we do, and so Americans perceive them as "non-fighting forces" and don't care what they do regarding their gay and lesbian troops.)

Well, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but it's not quite that simple, and neither is the history.

For one thing, DADT is the law of the land, overturnable not by the president, but rather by Congress. Everyone seems to get that at this point, including Barney Frank, who threw cold water on this weekend's march on Washington by saying "the only thing it's going to pressure is the grass" (members of Congress are home for the Columbus Day weekend.)

For another, while Harry Truman did indeed sign an executive order calling for the desegregation of the military ["Executive Order 9981, establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. It was accompanied by Executive Order 9980, which created a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment". Source: Redstone Arsenal], it was 6 years from the time he signed that order in 1948, until the day the last segregated regiment was disbanded in the U.S. in 1954. And it wasn't until the 1960s that the desegregation of the reluctant military was considered accomplished. Also from the Redstone Arsenal:

The true fulfillment of the entire scope of Executive Order 9981—equality of treatment and opportunity—actually required an additional change in Defense Department policy. This occurred with the publication of Department of Defense Directive 5120.36 on 26 July 1963, 15 years to the day after Truman signed the original order. This major about-face in policy issued by Secretary of Defense Robert J. McNamara expanded the military’s responsibility to include the elimination of off-base discrimination detrimental to the military effectiveness of black servicemen.

In other words, the desegregation of the U.S. military did not take place "with the stroke of a pen," nor did it originate with President Truman, who signed his executive order in the summer of the last year of his first term, having succeeded FDR, who had died 82 days into his fourth term. Notably, Roosevelt, considered a Democratic hero, did not, in four terms, attempt to desegregate the military.

Truman signed the order in the midst of a re-election fight that he was widely expected to lose. So fractured was Truman's coalition that southern Democrats had abandoned the Democratic Party, running their own candidate for president that year on the segregationist "Dixiecrat" line -- a guy named Strom Thurmond. The cause of the rift? Truman ordered a presidential level report in 1947 reviewing civil rights across the board in America, called "To Secure These Rights," which aimed at reforms in voting and employment, among other things. As for desegregating the military, that process had began in 1945, when not the president, but rather the secretary of war, undertook a review of racial policy in the United States Army, Navy and Marines:

1 October 1945 Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson ordered the U.S. Army to review its racial policies. Consequently, General George C. Marshall established a board headed by Lieutenant General Alvan C. Gillem, Jr., to study the situation and prepare a directive on the use of African Americans in the postwar Army.

17 November 1945 The Gillem Board finished its study of the Army’s racial policies and sent its report to the Chief of Staff. Although it came close to recommending that the Army integrate its forces, the Gillem Board members ultimately decided not to do so because integration "would have been a radical step, out of keeping with the climate of opinion in the country and in the Army itself." Instead the board provided 18 specific recommendations based on the principles that African Americans had "a constitutional right to fight" and the Army had "to make the most effective use of every soldier." Although the Gillem Board advised Army leaders to provide more opportunities for qualified blacks based on individual merit, it sidestepped the fundamental problem of segregation and only committed the Army to limited reforms.

1945-46 During the immediate postwar period, the U.S. Armed Forces began developing new racial policies. The need to make the most effective use of all available manpower, demands by civil rights groups, and higher black reenlistment rates were major factors affecting the new policies.

1945-50 The Marine Corps’ postwar attempt to adhere to a policy of rigid racial segregation remained in effect until the Korean War. It ultimately established a numerical quota of 1500 blacks, most of whom the Corps tried to assign to the nonwhite Steward’s Branch. Few recruits signed up for such duty, while those men already in that branch constantly sought transfers to general duty. Not only did this continual pressure cause problems for the USMC, but the unwillingness of most U.S. communities to accept "a large segregated group of black marines…was infinitely more difficult."

In short, the military after World War II was facing a problem of blacks who fought in the war wanting to re-enlist, but in most cases, the military didn't want them, except as Navy stewards or other menial tasks. The tension between the soldiers' demands, and increasing agitation from civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph, plus the basic manpower needs of the military, forced the military itself -- not the president -- to look at the policy. Truman didn't even become directly involved in the issue until September of 1946, when several instances of racially-motivated violence against black veterans caused his government to take an aggressive stance on civil rights across the board, with the military included in the mix. Which brings us to 1947:

May 1947 The Secretary of War adopted a National Guard Policy Committee resolution allowing individual states to determine the issue of "integration above the company level," although the Army continued to prohibit "integration at the company level." That same year, New Jersey became the first state to specifically end segregation in its militia. This action created new problems for Army leaders, who now had to deal with "an incompatible situation between the segregated active forces and the incompletely integrated reserve organization."

30 June 1947 By this time, African-American soldiers represented 7.91 percent of the Army’s total manpower. Instead of being based on their demographic presence in the U.S. population, however, black enlistments were "geared to a percentage of the total Army strength." By adjusting the enlistment quota, the Army could easily increase or decrease the percentage of blacks within its ranks.

25 July 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, reorganizing the U.S. military establishment. The new legislation created the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), a separate Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. It also reorganized the War Department as the Department of the Army and made the Joint Chiefs of Staff a permanent agency.

October 1947 To avoid the political backlash if he failed to act on discrimination in the federal government, President Truman’s political advisors decided that his best move was to issue an executive order "securing the civil rights of both civilian government employees and members of the armed forces."

Truman would issue that executive order in July of 1948, just months before the election, months after A. Philip Randoph had to go to the White House to complain that integration of blacks into the armed forces was simply not taking place, and just days after the Dixiecrats bolted from the Democratic Party following the July convention, because of Truman's strong civil rights platform. And yet, despite the order, it would be 15 years before the integration of the military really took place.

That's not to say that gay rights activists shouldn't advocate for their cause, particularly by pressing Congress, but if they're going to use history as a cudgel over this president's head, they should at least get the history right.

Saying President Obama could institute open service with the stroke of a pen is both historicaly inaccurate, and politically naive. It ignores the key facts about Truman's action:

1. Integration of the military was initiated by the military itself, not by the president;

2. Truman's order did not immediately desegregate the military; and

3. Truman did not desegregate the military at the beginning of his term, when he was at his most popular, having succeeded a popular Democratic president and won the war (by nuking Japan.) He waited until the end of his term, despite having had the military's internal report on desegregation on his desk for three years. In fact, it was only in what amounted to the final hour of his presidency (again, he very nearly lost the election) that Truman acted. No one knows why, especially since black soldiers had distinguished themselves as patriots during the war, and one would think that the immediate aftermath was the time to act. But wait he did. Sometimes, the politics of the moment requires a president to wait.

There's another point that activists are missing, and that's Afghanistan. President Obama is currently engaged in a tug of war with the military brass, and with one of his key generals, the NATO commander Gen. MacCrystal, over whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. And since any Democratic president, unfortunately, starts with a military leadership that is skeptical of him, Obama needs this period in his presidency to establish a good working relationship with the military. One of President Clinton's gravest mistakes was to strike out immediately, pushing to overturn the ban on gays in the military, which met with the immediate and virulent opposition of the military establishment. They pressed hard on Congress, and Congress responded with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Clinton, in effect, brought DADT on himself, by not taking the time to establish his bona fides, and his understanding of the military he was elected to lead. In other words, he did the opposite of Harry Truman, who put non-discrimination on a track that the military had some part in laying out, even if reluctantly. And it didn't hurt that Truman was himself a military veteran (of World War I) who had just won World War II.

It's not that Obama cannot do anything about DADT. (He can send a bill to Congress and push for it, though it would mean putting other priorities, like jobs and the economy, climate change, etc., on the back burner while red state Senators cower under the threat of the renewed culture wars...) but to say that "with the stroke of a pen" he can do everything you want, right now, damn the torpedoes, is just not true.

Barack Obama is in fact, doing what Truman did -- giving the military the opportunity to lead on the policy, which Sec. Gates and Jim Jones have said they're doing. Once he has a buy-in with the Pentagon, he'll be in a stronger position with the generals, and versus more conservative members of the Senate. If he can do "job one," and kick-start the economy and jobs, which impacts every American, straight and gay, he'll be in a stronger political position to push forward on this issue. Until then, activists are asking him to sacrifice his presidency for a single constituency, at a time when most Americans are asking, what's in this "change" business for them.

(Cross-posted at The Reid Report)